There’s something about playing co-op tactical shooters that is inherently a bit silly. Admittedly a good chunk of that comes from the company that you keep, but Rogue Point knows that you’re rocking up with friends to have a bit of fun, taking a lighter touch than a more hardcore SWAT team simulator, blending the tactical shooter aesthetic with a more arcade feel and roguelite structure.
Turning up in tight shorts and looking like a stereotypical Australian police officer that’s just hopped off their pedal bike, the start of your run gives you just enough cash to buy some body armour to go alongside your pistol. You’re woefully ill-equipped compared to a Tom Clancy thriller or SWAT sim, but that’s actually totally fine here.
That first mission you take on will be of fairly low danger with not too many enemies to deal with, but the real saving grace here is that this is more of an arcade shooter style. Instead of taking locational damage to armour and then limbs, and instead of just one or two bullets being able to take you out of the action, you’ve got a basic health bar with pips of armour on top, and health kits and defibs are there to get you and your teammates back into the action.
This is a very tame and family friendly planning map.
You can, of course, approach the game tactically. Before loading in, there’s a genuinely great planning screen with a map of the mission, showing entry, objectives and the extraction point, and you can draw on the map to plan out a path you want to take. Or you can draw willies (so long as you’re in a lobby with friends and people you know). We tended to draw willies. The one flaw here is that I couldn’t find a way to consult that plan once in the mission, so while still learning the maps, all that ‘planning’ immediately went out the window.
Planned or not, you can approach the game tactically, starting with a slow and steady approach to spotting enemies, using cover and clearing rooms…. but you can also basically just start blasting and take enemies down as they head to the scene. But on top of that, you do still have those tactical shooter touches. There’s always a few enemies camping at an objective, often with a barricaded door or two. You can kick down a locked door with a few almighty boots, but a battering ram can make quicker work of it, and when there’s a door blocker on the other side you might need a proper breaching charge. This comes with an animated countdown to blow up the door, allowing for a little extra coordination for you buddies to follow up with flashbangs and gunfire.
Thankfully, after a successful mission, you gain a choice of stat buffs and you’ll have earned some cash to spend on additional gear. You might also have grabbed a gun off a downed enemy, and brought it back with you. Buying specific guns isn’t cheap (especially when the cost of the heaviest armour is $2,000), but that just adds to the allure of the Dead Drops lucky dip. Throw money at this and you could get anything from a nicer pistol to a kitted-out main weapon, or a full kit of guns and tools – on my first effort, I got a great 12-gauge shotgun that had some serious range to it and was fantastic to use. Anything you don’t equip will go into your general inventory, which could be used for later missions, or share excess or just sell it to get some cash back.
Or you could need stuff for the same mission. The structure of each run boils down to seven randomised missions that escalate in size and difficulty, and while this is a roguelite, you do have the safety net of three team wipes before a run is fully failed. If you do wipe out, then you also lose your guns and gear, and that can put you in a pretty tricky spot when needing to try and take on that mission again.
There are permanent upgrades, though, with some fairly sensible cosmetics, so you can wear trousers and look less like beach police, and using weapons unlocks attachments for them.
The enemies you face emphasise the lighter tone compared to more serious tactical shooters. They’re all nicely colour-coded and have their specific silhouettes, so standard soldiers have red highlights, while there’s more advanced yellow-jacketed variants. More obviously distinct are the Berserkers that rush you with a machete, the Snipers who you’ll mainly see for their laser targeting, and then the beefy Heavy, who you need to focus on to stagger and then down. The run builds up to a wild boss battle against an even beefier baddy with a giant mascot head on!
Currently in Early Access on Steam, there are definitely limits to just how long these thrills will last, just from the limited number of maps, enemies and scenarios you’ll encounter. There’s four maps at the moment, and though they can be reshaped to a certain extent, have your starting and exfil points change and have different objectives, you’ll already start to see that repetition on the first run. The roadmap currently only says one more map is coming before hitting 1.0, and I’d have liked to see some more. That’s trickier for them to adjust on, but things like the planning map being in-mission and AI improvements are on the to-do list.
Ultimately, so long as you don’t go in expecting a hyper-realistic tactical simulator, Rogue Point is a good bit of fun. It’s a bit rough and ready, it’s fairly unserious if you have a gung-ho approach, and you can end up with some wild difficulty swings, but there’s an enjoyable shooter to play with the right group of friends, and only some of it is in drawing willies.
